Baseballhead:
Halfway House

Michael Cox

It's interesting that at the exact midpoint of the season MLB scheduled an almost unheard-of day off on Monday, especially with the All-Star break only a week away. Nevertheless, it's a good time for reflection on the good, the bad, and the ugly...

THE McGWIRE-MARIS MARCH - This whole thing would be great for baseball if people weren't already tiring of the press overkill. Everybody (except strikethree.com, that is) has some sort of "Maris Watch" thingy with a zippy bar chart for the numerically impaired. (Don't you fret though. We'll get one too, if he actually manages to get close to the record.)

About a week ago, though, it hit me: the reason the media hype has been so over the top for a guy who's only hit 36 HR is that they're all dead scared that Smackin' Mac will roll his ankle one day and the whole thing will come to a screeching halt. So, they're milking it for all it's worth right now. Sure, it's fun to watch him belt shots into the next county, but we should be enjoying that for what it is: a sideshow. When the pennant races get tight, McGwire will be walking more than the Teamsters as teams playing for the postseason realize that even a sure walk every time up is fewer total bases than he's been getting so far.

A betting man would be laying odds on the slow-but-steady Ken Griffey, Jr., only four HR behind McGwire, yet almost completely out of the glare of the Maris spotlight...

FIGHT! FIGHT! - Despite all the public fretting and fussing over the amount of fighting and inside pitching in MLB this season, I just don't see that it's any worse than it's been in the past. I'll grant you that charging the mound and the bench-clearing brawl are more common in our day, but that would be compared to 25 years ago, not 1997.

While there are pitchers not scared to come inside, even a little bit far like Randy Johnson or aiming to plonk like Orel Hershiser or Carlos Perez, and batters who take inside heat as a personal affront like Kenny Lofton or Darryl Strawberry (and Straw wasn't even the one in the box!), there'll be fighting. All the wacky-ass suspensions and fines Gene Budig can levy won't help a whit.

If there's a problem today, it's the inflexibility of the hitters. A guy like Mo Vaughn just has no capability of getting out of the way of chin music because he's dug in with his head right over the plate. At least Mo knows this, and just heads on up to first with only a cursory bit of intimidation towards the hurler. Plenty of other guys think it's their God-given right to anchor themselves to the batter's box. Willie Mays would likely not still be with us if he had behaved that way.

CORN COBB - I'm not sure what the ESPN marketing department has been smoking for the past couple of years. 1997 brought us the "Big League Detective Agency" sketch/ad, staring Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa. With their own web page and 800-number, only one thing was missing: they dropped off the TV entirely! Somehow it was decided that the actual humor potential was too great, so the Zappa brothers were 86'd in favor of the largely unfunny Nicholas Turturro touring the country with a guy dressed as Lincoln. Each time an actual ballplayer appeared in an ad with these guys, you could almost see the question marks appearing above the poor athlete's head.

Well, this season ESPN is trying to update the image of that great American, Ty Cobb. Away with the angry coot who'd rather you just get the hell away from him - presto-change-o, now he's a contemplative baseball philosopher! There could be some sort of joke involved, but as last season demonstrated, good humor is not these folks' strong point. The problem is that no casual fan who hasn't seen "Cobb" is gonna know that the "Georgia Peach" didn't spend his pre-game time doling out soliloquies, or doing much else besides filing his spikes.

It might've been more effective to feature the grizzled old Cobb handing out pearls that are more in-character, like say, "Baseball's a damn sight better than that crap they call music," or, "Get the hell away from me! Why don't you go watch a baseball game?"

And after a full day without it, that's a damn good idea.

Michael Cox thought last night would be a wonderful time to get caught up on the "Police Academy" movies. Gently tell him why he still feels empty inside at mc@strikethree.com.